Spring - A robotics and automation toolkit for research and industry

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation(CSIRO) has recently open sourced the robotics toolkit Spring. It isused to control robots weighing from 3000t behemoths down to sub 1kgfeather weights, scaling from powerful multi-core processors tolightweight embedded chips. Spring is used to control machines on theground, under the waves, and in the air.

The Spring toolkit has dual roles, to be an easy to use researchplatform, and to also be an industrially robust platform forcommercial solutions. These competing roles provide for interestingengineering tradeoffs.

The toolkit include modules for taking input from a wide variety ofsensors, a publish/subscribe event notification service for hookingeverything together, and higher level modules to direct the robot.

This presentation will cover the technical aspects of the toolkit, theopen sourcing journey, and the future directions of the toolkit. Mostimportantly the various applications of the toolkit will be showcased.

Clinton Roy

Clinton is a software engineer based in Australia, he has beenfortunate enough to work with, and on, Open Source software for hisentire career.

Clinton has an interest in improving software quality through improvedengineering practices, focussing on design, testing and automation.